


Too Much to Ask For

by staranise



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, Angst, Gen, OMC - Freeform, POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-18
Updated: 2010-04-18
Packaged: 2017-10-09 00:25:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/81036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/staranise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Left-behind Cam, in Continuum: the only person he knows well in his remote Alaskan town is his bartender.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Much to Ask For

John Clemens knew a little Latin, so everyone called him Kind Jack. His father came up to Alaska for a gold rush that had ended by the time he got there, and stayed for years, working on ships. Kind Jack loved the arctic because it was home. His father had sent him to live with his California relatives for highschool, and he’d spent the last year of the Great War in France, then tucked his bag up under his arm and gone straight home. He was sick enough of ships and mines to buy the tavern in his little outpost town, and now he was a permanent fixture, and knew every woman, man, and child within a hundred miles.

Increasingly these days, supplies came, not overland or by sea, but by plane. They would land in the harbor, pull in at the dock, unload their pathetically small cargoes; eventually the town cleared out a rutted field of dirt for an airstrip. The pilots would usually come to Kind Jack’s bar and swap stories and news they couldn’t get through the radio. There were some small companies forming, but occasionally an independent without a pre-arranged schedule came through. Cameron Mitchell was one; he brought Kind Jack’s daughter June back up in ’38, when she was done her own time in highschool in California.

A year later, after June had moved on, Mitchell came back and bought a little cabin south of town, a not-unreasonable distance from the harbor. He still flew as an independent carrier. Kind Jack didn’t know a lot about planes, but it was clear as day the man was the best pilot he’d ever seen, and crazy to boot: willing to take on anything and everything, hungry for more, and it was a wonder he’d survived to his present age with behavior like that. Kind Jack knew him better than most people, on account his profession; as the town's barkeep he was privy to more than most folk. Sometimes it felt like Cam _wanted_ to be sociable, but there was something holding him back. They’d talk, sometimes, when Cam came home from a flight, since Kind Jack’s bar was between the tiny little airstrip and home. He knew Cam’s type; men just went away, sometimes, trying to put something awful behind him, and Alaska was as far away as you could get. The loneliness was killing for some of them, and they bellied up to Kind Jack’s bar and spent a few hours in a circle of light and talked, or didn’t, and tried to remember what it felt like to be human. Whenever anything good came north in his liquor crates (not like it did these days, what with the war; the local stills were doing a good business but it wasn't the same) he saved a bottle of bourbon for the man.

They got him talking, once, about his family in the South; a hundred people, sounded like, each more outrageous than the last, but even blind drunk Cam kept cutting things off, leaving spaces in his words, and it was clear he wasn’t saying was just as big as what he was.

"Wish I could go back," Cam said.

Kind Jack just topped up his glass. You never asked why they couldn’t.

When the cable came through saying June’s baby was born, Kind Jack took one look at the storm blowing in and knew if he didn’t move now he’d be stuck there for a month, and it wasn’t every day a man had a grandson. There was a plane in the harbor, but its pilot was already lashing it up and renting a room, so Kind Jack passed the keys to his bar off Miss Ellen, who managed the dry goods store, and walked down to Myrna’s to use her phone.

"Juneau? Sure thing," Cam was saying now, on the other end of the wire. "I’ll meet you there, and you get Jan started on my plane. I’ll be down as quick as I can."

It was theoretically April, but the wind whipping in was cold. Kind Jack bundled up under sealskin and spent half an hour in the little wooden hangar, his hands tucked in his armpits, stamping his feet while Cam and the boy he was teaching to fly babied the J-3 Cub into life and onto the runway. Jan would keep the scotch safe at his house until they got back; it was good to keep the really good stuff out of the bar while somebody else was minding it.

"That boy oughta be training with the army," he said to Cam, as he climbed into the plane. He could only see the back of the man’s head, but he could hear Cam make a little sound of disapproval.

"He’s too young," Cam said. "But I don’t think I’d worry. The war’s probably gonna go on a few more years, at this rate. He’ll have his chance to get shot at, same as everybody else."

"Awfully sour-sounding, for a man who hasn’t been to war himself."

Cam didn’t reply, just taxied down the short runway. The Cub leapt into the air like always, and Kind Jack clamped his mouth shut to avoid being sick as the winds tossed the little plane around; they banked to get headed in the right direction, and then they were off.

He knew he’d said something wrong when it was another half hour before Mitchell spoke. "How’s your Ed?"

"Haven’t had a letter since my last. Still in the Phillipines, I guess."

Unlike every other soul in town, Cam never talked about the war. He’d only said, once, that he hadn’t been of age for the Great War. When some of the other pilots had left to join up right after Pearl Harbour he’d taken home all the liquor he could find and (Kind Jack later heard from Jan) got himself good and drunk two days straight, then gone back to his shipping routes.

They were quiet the whole rest of the way. The storm was behind them, so when they landed in Juneau (Cam swearing at the other pilots, sometimes over the radio, and trying to negotiate the dusk) the sky was clear and open. The pilot helped Kind Jack down, then stopped beside his plane and looked up.

"First star. Look."

Cam Mitchell seemed to love the stars more than anything else, bourbon probably included. More than he’d loved any woman he’d ever laid eyes on so far as Kind Jack saw. Back when June had married her man in Juneau the group of them gathered in the bar’s lamplight had talked about marriage, and all Cam’d said was, "A family’s too much for me to ask for."

Now he turned away from the sky and said with a funny look on his face, "You give June my regards."

"I surely will." Kind Jack didn’t know what else to say to him, so after another pause he turned, and walked away, over the tarmac.

Cam Mitchell tucked his hands into his pockets and leaned against his plane, then went back to looking at the sky.


End file.
